I'm not so good with the advice. Can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?

Thursday, May 19, 2011

I do believe in magic

"You know, I do believe in magic. I was born and raised in a magic time ... In a magic town ... Among magicians. Most everybody else didn't realize we lived in that web of magic. Connected by the silver filaments of chance and circumstance. But I knew it all along. See, this is my opinion - we all start outknowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth. And because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they'd allowed to wither in themselves.

After you go so far away from it, you can't really get it back. You can have seconds of it. Just seconds of knowing and remembering. When people get weepy at movies, it's because in that dark theater, the golden pool of magic is touched, just briefly. Then they come out into the hard sun of logic and reason again and it dries up, and they're left feeling a little heart-sad and not knowing why. When a song stirs a memory, when motes of dust turning in a shaft of light takes your attention from the world, when you listen to a train passing on a track at night in the distance and you wonder where it might be going, you step beyond who you are and where you are. For the briefest of instants, you have stepped into the magic realm.

That's what I believe.

The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us. We get shouldered with burdens, some of them good, some of them not so good. Things happen to us. Loved ones die. People get in wrecks and get crippled. People lose their way, for one reason or another. It’s not hard to do, in this world of crazy mazes. Life itself does its best to take that memory of magic away from us. You don’t know it’s happening until one day you feel you’ve lost something but you’re not sure what it is. It’s like smiling at a pretty girl and she calls you “sir.” It just happens.

These memories of who I was and where I lived are important to me. They make up a large part of who I’m going to be when my journey winds down. I need the memory of magic if I am ever going to conjure magic again. I need to know and remember, and I want to tell you."

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About Me

A man of words and not of deeds, is like a garden full of weeds
And when the weeds begin to grow, it's like a garden full of snow
And when the snow begins to fall, it's like a bird upon the wall
And when the bird away does fly, it's like an eagle in the sky
And when the sky begins to roar, it's like a lion at the door
And when the door begins to crack, it's like a stick across your back
And when your back begins to smart, it's like a penknife in your heart
And when your heart begins to bleed, you're dead,and dead,and dead indeed....